ESTATE PROVISION


COVID-19’s impact on the long-term estate


Charlotte Hutchinson, Associate partner, Carter Jonas (London), discusses the long-term impacts of the global pandemic on the future provision of healthcare real estate.


In June 2023 Carter Jonas achieved planning consent for a brand new Community Diagnostic Centre for Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust.


At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2020, the UCL’s Bartlett Real Estate Institute (The Bartlett Real Estate Institute 2020)1


considered the impact


of COVID on the built environment. Its resulting report, ‘How COVID-19 will impact residential development’ concluded: ‘This pandemic will change people, the economy, and society, in ways we can’t yet imagine. We could be at a crossroads in history of the same significance as the Black Death and the two World Wars. Like it or not, it really is time to re-think real estate. Around four years later, this article will address the long-term impacts of the global pandemic on the future provision of healthcare real estate. The immediate impacts (the provision of Nightingale Hospitals, structural changes required to enable social distancing, and the impact of the Coronavirus Act 2020 in enabling shorter-term solutions) are well known – so this article looks ahead at the way in which planning and designing for the health sector is changing.


Increased demand Prior to the COVID pandemic, the 2019 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: ensuring that the health of a child born today is not defined by a changing climate,2


Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, promised to build 40 new hospitals – and immediately received criticism that such a number failed to acknowledge the scale of the challenge and the overhaul required. The COVID pandemic threw into sharp focus the UK’s undersupply of necessary facilities. As Stephen Cousins states in Rethink: How will COVID-19 affect healthcare design? (Cousins, S 2020),5 ‘Britain has a very low number of acute hospital beds per head of population, and since 1961 the numbers have dramatically reduced – to a point where, alongside Sweden, we have the least in Europe. About 15,000 more ICU beds are required to match European norms.’ A 2022 poll by Policy Exchange,6


ahead of a call stated that outbreaks of


infectious disease were likely to become more frequent, as the world becomes more connected, and rising global temperatures create more favourable conditions for the transmission of disease. As a 2020 report by WSP, Hospitals After COVID-19: How Do We Design For An Uncertain Future?3


states, around the world work is


already under way to review building regulations and standards, focusing not only on hospital buildings, but also on the guidelines that govern their operations too. As an example of this, in the last year it was reported that China planned to add more than 28,000 new beds, while India anticipates capacity for a further 24,000, according to James Cash, in the 2022 article, ‘How did a global pandemic change hospital design?’4 Here in the UK, at the height of the pandemic, the then


128 Health Estate Journal October 2024


for evidence on the future of building hospitals, showed that 81% of respondents put new, modern healthcare buildings in the top three priorities required of Government infrastructure.


Standalone facilities One of the major changes in healthcare facilities is the move towards standalone bespoke units, which responds to a need at the height of the pandemic (and one which remains a concern within the population at large), to avoid cross-contamination, especially where ‘vulnerable’ patients are concerned. Carter Jonas has been involved in several such schemes, including Barking Community Hospital and a community diagnostic centre for West Middlesex Hospitals. In June 2023 Carter Jonas achieved planning consent


for a brand new Community Diagnostic Centre for Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. The 0.1 hectare site has been host to the


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